Words, Words, Words

“Words, words, words” 

Sometimes I can’t see the wood for the trees. That idiom has always puzzled me. Does it mean that I can’t see the forest because I am looking at the individual parts of the forest (the trees) too closely? Or does it mean that I can’t see the actual material (the wood) because I am looking at the bigger picture of the trees? I suppose it can mean both: I can be blind to details or I can be blind to context. I am tempted to think that this is a duck/rabbit trick – I can see one or the other but not both at the same time. 

When it comes to language I have a similar experience. Through training I tend to look at language in different ways. There are many ways of looking at words, words, words.  Sometimes I think I am the butt of a joke being told endlessly, that I am Polonius on the wrong end of Hamlet’s sneering and I can feel the words “Very like a whale” forming on my lips. Maybe all this time I am looking at words, words, words, and the stuff that really happens is taking place behind my back, under my nose, over my head? It’s possible, indeed I think it’s inevitable. I think the most hopeful line ever written is at the end of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus:

"My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)"

This is the light at the end of the tunnel. But for now I am still in the tunnel, sorry on the ladder; keep climbing…

So, words, words, words. Recently, under the influence of structural and post structural linguistics, I have been thinking a lot about how meaning is supposed to be unstable. About how, when you look up close (at the wood, at the trees) what you see is not a word but rather, words, words, words. The ‘logocentrism’ of language is, for Jacques Derrida and others, is how words hide behind words, how meaning is passed off as stable, as fixed, as present. For Derrida and anyone else influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure, language, words have meaning by virtue of their place in a chain of ‘signifiers’.

I understand the relationship between these possible signifiers as being a both neutral one – chair means chair because it is not cheer, hair, there, bear and so on – and a value laden one: ‘God’ means something good because it’s better than ‘Devil’.

Similarly, both ‘Derry’ and ‘Londonderry’ name a place, both ‘Islamic State’ and ‘Daesh’ name an organisation but the binary relationship is inverted depending of the affiliation of the speaker.  

Looking closely at how words work by showing/hiding, presencing/absencing can often lead me to forget how fixed certain meanings can be. Another cardinal notion of structural linguistics - that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary – can seem comically pedantic. This is where the wood (or the trees) of the bigger picture can disappear because with your eyes on the abstract it is easy miss the feelings, functions, resonances of context.

Of course, the opposite tendency – to miss the wood (or the trees) of detail – happens when context seduces. Ideas become dogma and words start to glow with a life of their own. Words themselves start to matter.

What happens when words matter? I have been thinking a lot about fundamentalism of different kinds recently. The first that comes to mind is Islamic fundamentalism.

At a fundamental level, Islam is fundamental. Words matter. Words have matter. Words are the matter of God. What is the status of language in the Qur'an? For believers it is certainly not representational. There is no separation of sign and thing - these words do not re-present God they, in a literal sense, present God; the word made flesh, the 'presencing' of God.

Neither do Muslims think of the words of the Qur'an as being the incarnation of God. For Islam, God is indissoluble (God "neither begets nor is begotten") and therefore, all of these - the words on the Guarded Tablet (al-lawḥ al-maḥfāẓ  the place where the Qur’an was written in heaven prior to their arrival on earth), the received, revealed words of the Qur'an in the mind and mouth of Mohammed, the words of the page of every (Arabic) Qur'an - are of one flesh.

So, the Qur’an is literally the word of God. Haven’t they read Structural Linguistics? When it comes to logocentrism, God is the daddy of them all. Nobody does it better. Is this a problem?

I don’t think it’s the biggest one. The problem with Islamic Fundamentalism is that some of its adherents have taken to killing on a mass scale. They’re not the only ones. There are Europeans and Americans drunk on a fundamentalism of their own – the axiomatic rightness of military intervention in the Middle East and the Capitalist system that it supports are ideas far more lethal and long standing than anything informing the actions of the Taliban, Al Queda or Daesh. When it comes to Islamic Fundamentalists their sense of rightness is on the surface; Jihad is being waged against infidels. European/American Fundamentalists engage in an obscene, venal double speak where ‘freedom’ is being brought to ‘stabilise’ the region. There are two seemingly opposed tendencies here. One seeks to arrest meaning, the other seeks its exile. In both cases – excessive logocentrism and excessive logo - ex - centrism - language seems to be to a victim; dogma and deceit are both ways of abusing language.

Of course I think that behind the lies spouted by politicians there is a language ‘behind’ the surface relativism. The discourse of ‘freedom’ versus ‘terror’ may be so much babble for public consumption, but in the background language is just as logocentric. Words have strict meanings at this latent, bottom line, not for public consumption level, too, make no mistake. The fundamentals of Western involvement in the Middle East - Oil, money, killing, stealing – are undeniable.  

Logocentrism is alive and well. By the way, in all of this I am not blind to the difference between interrogating a politician and interrogating God. The equivalence that I describe between the Western and Islamic fundamentalists is an ethical one, not a linguistic one. I have no fear of criticising a politician…

Now I am not going to say that logocentrism kills. Words don’t kill, steal or rape; people do. Words may hurt a lot but sticks and stones break your bones. It is tempting to isolate certain uses of language that do actually do things – J L Austin’s Speech Act Theory calls these ‘performative utterances’. Hamlet may have been playing around with words, words, words, but when he altered that letter to the King of England his words literally murdered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But there are limits to what words can do. 

Before that point I like to think of words as weirdly cybernetic. They are human and yet they are not. They exist in our minds and in our mouths and yet they are outside us, in the air, on this screen. Is it any wonder that meaning tends to arrest or exile? Words matter and that’s fine. But they also do not matter. They are us and they are not us. The challenge is to keep this gap open – to stay true to the meanings of words and yet to allow for a space to interrogate and reimagine those words. Where there are words there is hope.  

The fact that logocentrism can be brought to see the wood when it tries to show us the trees or brought to see the trees when it tries to show us the wood, means that meaning can be allowed stability just as much as it can be destabilised. 

Beyond persuasion and seduction, promises and commands words are powerless. Sometimes, the talking has to stop. Even Hamlet acted in the end.